


Unrecorded

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Joker (2019)
Genre: AU: oh fuck there's TWO of them, Blood and Injury, Gen, M/M, Murder by Proxy, Mutilation, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:00:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23095981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: So, you wanna know how he got those scars?
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Joker (DCU), Joker (DCU)/Joker (DCU)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29
Collections: Anywhere I Lay My Head I Will Call My Home





	1. Press Start

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



> Okay, fuck, well, i guess i'm climbing out of my little clown car again. Been a few years.
> 
> So forever ago, when TDK came out, I had a wild and incredibly in depth theory that I could rattle off with very specific notations to the source material about a back story for The Joker. Bullet points being: grew up poor in a dysfunctional home in Gotham, joined the military like so many poor kids do on the hopes of finding a way out of a dead end life, excelled, actually held some kind of hope that he'd really Made It, gets captured with his unit, watches many of them die, gets the scars, escapes, manages to claw his way back to a friendly base, is debriefed and basically shit-canned for being mentally unfit and, to bury the fact that the military is totally willing to leave soldiers in the field as disposable prisoners if there's not strategic benefit in recovering them, his service record was sealed and buried, so he can't even acquire what passes for veteran's services post-discharge. Everything sort of spirals from there until he becomes the man we see in the film.
> 
> Anyway, I'm an antisocial curmudgeon so nobody but close personal friends had to suffer through my ramblings, but Eli just had to drag me back here so, honk honk bitches.
> 
> Only additional note here is that this takes place in the same AU as @Mr-Finch's 'To Watch You Burn', and you should read that first. Go read it.

_ Name, rank, number. _

It’s drilled into every active servicemen's head, when captured, that’s all you give. Cry, bleed, puke, piss your pants if you have to, but you don’t give the enemy anything. Not a goddamn thing.

Easy to learn. Most of the shit in training had been easy. 

Joker had known he was good at violence. He hadn't known, asked to train that violence into something with more than anger behind it, it would be something that came so naturally to him. He excelled at violence, he exuded it, he delighted in it; the Marines gave him a place to not only be good at it, but to work with people who wanted him to be good at it, wanted him to be better.

He had thought, getting away from Gotham -- he had thought, for all he was losing in leaving Fleck behind, he was gaining something too. A purpose, a place, people who would come looking for him if he went missing.

_ Name, rank, number. _

Nobody but green recruits calls him Lynch. Nobody at all calls him Joseph; he hasn't spoken to his mother in years, and she was the last. 

Joseph is the name he gives his captors, spitting it in their masked faces. Joseph Lynch, second Lieutenant, serial number xxxxxxxxx, United States Marine Corp. Every time he says it, it feels like a needle he's sliding under their nails, frustration leaking out of them like heat from a fire.

He's going to get out of here. They've killed his men, all but Reed and Simmons, and Reed's so out of it most of the time, Joker doesn't know if he'll make it through an escape. 

Joker's not entirely sure if he cares, a dirty, ugly truth he's buried under his tongue.

The only person he ever gave a damn about keeping alive was Fleck, and he left Fleck alone eight years ago. He'd designated Arthur as the recipient of his flag, should he die in action.

He wonders if Arthur would keep it. If he'd even accept it.

He wonders, six weeks after capture, if Arthur would even care anymore.

_ Name, rank, number. _

They tie him to a chair and they scream at him. They don't ever speak to him in English, barely speak any Farsi. He doesn't speak enough Azerbaijani to understand half the shit he's asked, but it doesn't matter.

Could be asked in perfect Gotham-accented English and he wouldn't give them fuck all. They get his name, his rank, his serial number. 

One of them pulls a knife out. It's like a magic trick; empty hand, flick, now there's a knife. Joker tells himself he's going to learn to do that, he's going to get out of here and he's going to go home and he's going to take leave, he's finally, really going to take a leave and go  _ home, _ and he's going to kiss Arthur and he’s going to show him that magic trick, because if anyone would get it, get the joke, it would be Arthur. 

No question about it, he'd understand.

The man with the knife doesn't need to speak much English to make his threats clear. He has Reed half out of his chair and the knife against Reed's throat and Reed looks like a little bird with a song in his chest.

Can't allow it. Can't be had, not on his watch.

He understands the fear, he knows what Reed is thinking. If he sings, they become safe. Even if they become dead, at least the terror stops. At least he can do  _ something  _ to find control, to be in charge of one singular moment of this horror. 

Joker doesn't want to die in this shit hole. He doesn’t want to die and he  _ certainly _ isn’t going to die letting them have what they want.

He's tied to a chair, but the chair isn't bolted to the ground. No one expects it when he heaves himself up, elasticized rope bruising his arms, and throws himself into the man with the knife, driving the stiletto point into Reed's eye. Reed dies almost instantly, looking scared and hopeful and so fucking stupid that all Joker can do, even as he's being hauled upright, even as the man with the bloody knife is rounding on him, incandescent with fury -- all Joker can do is laugh.

Arthur would get this joke too.

He laughs through the beating that follows. They ask him questions and he can't give his name, rank, or his serial number anymore; he can't remember any of it. He gives them laughter instead, and when the man with the knife sticks the blade in his mouth he keeps laughing. 

They carve his face open, ear to ear, it feels like. Reed's blood is bitter on the steel the first time he's cut; his own blood washes out the taste after that. There's a split in his lip and great grinning rents from the corners of his mouth to the far sides of his jaw, and he falters there, laughing, and wonders -- would Arthur get  _ this  _ joke?

When he's thrown back in the dark with Simmons, Simmons asks where Reed is, and Joker laughs. It's a terrible joke, he says, while Simmons tries to do something to stop the bleeding of his face.

_ Terrible joke, don't make me repeat it. _


	2. Great Jokes Told Through Tears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The events of this take place concurrent to Mr-Finch's 'To Watch You Burn', so once again: read that first.

Coming back to Gotham after his discharge was, in the end, inevitable. 

Where the hell else could he find people like this? Where else would he find people who would flinch away from a few raw facial scars and then unhesitatingly, unblinkingly step over a homeless man half froze to death on the sidewalk? New York City didn't have shit on Gotham when it came to income disparity and no place on _Earth_ could match the general apathy.

He comes back with some vague idea about finding Arthur. He knew things had gone rough for the kid -- he knew now, too, that half the shit he'd written or sent, hoping to give some kind of life line, were snared out before reaching Arthur, either by the military or by the prison. Arthur had been the only person, he holds onto it tight in his chest, who ever held him after he got an ass-kicking. Arthur was probably the only person he'd ever loved, and certainly the only person he'd ever found _worthy_ of loving. 

Then he gets a good look at his face in a mirror, no bandages, no shitty medic tent lights, no streaks of blood and filth. He looks at the way he's carved up and he laughs and laughs at the idea of his beautiful little sweetheart waiting all this time just to fall into the arms of _this_ clown. 

Arthur had stopped writing a long time ago. Joker had thought, maybe, when he collected his back pay and his discharge papers, there would be a tidy stack of mail he'd missed, but he gets nothing. 

That's fair. Almost eight full years ago, Joker gave the kid a useless bundle of bullshit gifts, cigarettes and a knife and all Arthur's pretty drawings; he'd given him a couple cheap gifts and then he'd abandoned him. It was a good sort of joke, something in the lag between symmetry. The fact that Arthur was better off without him, would have likely been better never knowing him, is just another fucking riot of a joke. 

Joker, it seems, is full of jokes these days. 

It helps, being able to see the innate humor in sacrificing anything he might have had, including his love life and his fucking face, to the US military, only to show up for his first post-exit counseling session at Gotham's only VA Hospital and be told they have no patient record for a Joseph Lynch. No record for Joker Lynch. No record for any recent patient by the surname Lynch at all. 

In a dim way, sitting in a park near the hospital and smoking a cigarette he had the vague idea he really couldn't afford, he understands what's happening. He understands that it's not a joke anyone but him is going to get -- not Arthur, not dead men in the desert, not the government that's elected to fuck him over rather than do any measure of right by him. 

There's no plan for how to handle this. No simple direction to go, no alternative place to turn all neat and ready. He thinks he used to have plans, used to fight and scramble and clutch at straws to have a plan for everything, to be ready to deal with anything. 

Look where that shit got him.

Violence comes naturally to him; it's the one thing he ever truly excelled at. It was always a sort of open secret that Gotham's various criminal enterprises hired thugs through want ads, that you shouldn't answer ads in any of the local papers that featured certain words. Joker had no use for organized crime but potential cash flow, but there is, again, a certain humour in the laggy symmetry here. Military to mercenary.

Six months after receiving his dishonorable discharge for screaming in the face of the quack military psychiatrist that the whole fucking system was the shittiest joke anyone ever told, his hair has grown out shaggy and hangs in his face, shadowing his eyes but doing nothing to hide the scars. People avoid him in public, get nervous if he has to talk to them, no matter how casually he speaks. He picks the want ads out of the _Gazette_ on a lark, looking for those half-remembered buzzwords, and three days later he meets up with a guy looking for extra muscle on a job 'moving time sensitive materials'. 

The guy is real far down the Falcone family COC, looking to subcontract some smash and grab work he clearly was meant to be doing himself. It was a waste of Joker's talent, but the guy wanted to hire him on the spot, said he knew no one would fuck with a guy like him. 

An in. He does the job fast and well, enjoys the mayhem of busting up some high end clothing store and stealing sensitive financial documents. He gets paid in cash, and cash buys him a few guns for the next job. 

He starts doing jobs for anyone who will pay. He's not picky, and he knows the upper echelons of Gotham's little gangster collab fucking hate independent operators like him, especially when they're better than the guys they can keep on a leash. Which is, in and of itself, a real funny joke; these rich criminals with all their dignified little gentleman rules, their armies, their leashed dogs, their own private set of laws. 

Joker doesn't want to be leashed, he doesn't want to be anyone's dog. 

He'd much rather be a clown.

Somewhere along the line he starts getting a reputation. He moved quickly -- perhaps tellingly so -- from smashing stores to more creative violence, and he liked leaving a mess. Professional, no witnesses, effective. If you wanted a message sent, hire Joker. 

Made men from both Maroni and Falcone's organizations tried to buy him, that was a good enough sign that this job was meant for him. A year in, some dickhead at a sit-down he's hired to do security for calls him a clown -- "Who the fuck paid the clown to show up?"; Joker breaks his jaw even as an idea begins to coalesce. 

The grease paint becomes his own fun little signature. He's got money now, and he throws it around the poorer parts of Gotham, hiring his own help. Eighteen months after that crowning joke in the VA Hospital, he's made a real name for himself in Gotham's criminal circles, more boogeyman than boss. There's always desperate folks in the poorer parts of Gotham, sick and tired bleeding themselves dry following the law, whether the law was written by politicians in City Hall or criminals behind closed doors, and Joker is happy to put them to work. 

One of them, a giggly older woman, mother of some Russian mafiya goon who cut her off when his bosses declared her dead weight, brings him the suit. She moves fabric for some tailor in the business district, and the suit is some purple monstrosity made for a costume party and never picked up. Eggplant and grape and plum, the mockery of that respectable businessman other crime bosses in Gotham try to look like. 

It doesn’t really fit, too narrow in the shoulders and short in the sleeve, but that really just makes the joke. She claps her hands when he sweeps his hair out of his face and strikes a little pose, the mockery of every men’s fashion ad, and she says, “There now, a suit for the шут,” the two words nearly rhyming, and he loves it.

No one remembers Joseph Lynch. Joker barely remembers him. 

People remember _The Joker_. They remember the suit and the paint, they remember the laughter. They remember the scars. 

He all but owns the Narrows and the Lower East. Areas too poor for the more legitimate gangs to worry about, he owns them by throwing money at people to do things they want to do anyway. Rob a store, burn down a store, beat the shit out the guy who looked at them wrong last week. He pays for chaos, he pays to watch people be who they really are, and he keeps his ear to the ground, listening for the muttering to start.

And it does. Crime lords like Maroni, Chechen, Gambol -- they don’t _like_ a talented, enterprising operative out there when he’s not on their payroll. Why, he might take a job from them one week, then turn on them the next! Mercenaries don’t follow their little rules and agreements.

But, muttering or no muttering, they still find him useful.


End file.
